John had been battling illness since early 2023. The news was announced on John’s Facebook page a short time ago.
“It is with great sadness the family of John Pilger announce he died yesterday 30 December 2023 in London aged 84. His journalism and documentaries were celebrated around the world, but to his family he was simply the most amazing and loved Dad, Grandad and partner. Rest In Peace,” the post read.
John was twice awarded Britain’s Journalist of the Year, and his work has received numerous accolades around the world including from the British Film and Television Awards, and the Sydney Peace Prize in 2009.
John was a regular contributor to New Matilda, and a staunch ally of jailed Australian publisher Julian Assange, a campaign which engulfed much of the last decade of Pilger’s life. But it was his work on documentaries for which he was known globally. His first documentary, The Quiet Mutiny, was released in 1970 after a visit to Vietnam. His most recent work was The Dirty War on the NHS, an investigation into the assault on Britain’s health system.
John had a strong and enduring interest in Indigenous affairs. His book The Secret Country became renowned internationally for blowing the lid on the Australian Government’s treatment of its Aboriginal people. He turned the book into a film in 1985, and then completed several more documentaries on the First Australians, including Utopia in 2014, with New Matilda editor Chris Graham, and former New Matilda writer Amy McQuire.
John was also a friend of the Palestinian people. In 1977, he released a documentary entitled ‘Palestine is Still The Issue’. He released a new documentary in 2002 with the same name.
In total, he’s propduced more than 50 documentaries. but it was Year Zero (1979), about the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, which launched John into the journalism stratosphere. John was amongst the first journalists into Cambodia after the collapse of the regime, and when his documentary for ITV aired in Great Britain, it shocked the conscience of a nation. It also broke records, raking in almost $50 million in fundraising to assist the people of Cambodia.
John remained a prolific writer throughout his life, and has published countless articles and at least a dozen books.
New Matilda will release a more detailed tribute to John Pilger in the coming days.
As WikiLeaks founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange has nearly exhausted his appeals to British courts against a US extradition order, Australia has ramped up its advocacy on his behalf. Six Australian MPs held a press conference outside the US Department of Justice on September 20 to urge the Biden administration to halt its pursuit of Assange (Consortium News, 9/20/23).
They came representing an impressive national consensus: Almost 80% of Australian citizens, and a cross-party coalition in Australia’s Parliament, support the campaign to free Assange (Sydney Morning Herald, 5/12/23). Opposition leader Peter Dutton joined Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in urging Assange’s release.
The day before, an open letter to the Biden administration signed by 64 Australian parliamentarians appeared as a full-page ad in the Washington Post. It called the prosecution of Assange “a political decision” and warned that, if Assange is extradited, “there will be a sharp and sustained outcry” from Australians.
Given what is at stake for freedom of the press in the Assange case, and the intensified pressure from Australia—a country being wooed to actively enlist in the US campaign against China by spending $368 billion on nuclear submarines and supersonic missiles (Sydney Morning Herald, 8/10/23)—we ought to expect coverage from the Washington Post, New York Times and major broadcast networks. But coverage of the press conference was virtually absent from US corporate media.
Prosecuting publishing
The US has been seeking to extradite Assange from Britain on charges relating to the leaking of hundreds of thousands of documents to international media in 2010 and 2011, many of which detailed US atrocities carried out in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and other human rights violations, such as the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay (Abby Martin, 3/10/23).
In 2019, President Donald Trump’s administration brought Espionage Act charges against Assange for obtaining and publishing leaked documents, a dramatic new attack on press freedom (FAIR.org, 8/13/22). Assange could face 175 years in a supermax prison if convicted under the Espionage Act, “a relic of the First World War” meant for spies (AmericanConstitution Society, 9/10/21), and not intended to criminalize leaks to or publications by the press. The Biden administration has rolled back much of the legal mechanism used by Trump to attack journalists, but President Joe Biden has reaffirmed the call to extradite Assange.
Assange also coordinated with international news outlets to publish other material known as Cablegate about the “inner-workings of bargaining, diplomacy and threat-making around the world” (Intercept, 8/14/23). Indeed, the New York Times (e.g., 11/28/10) published many articles based on the WikiLeaks documents, which had been sent to Assange by US army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
US officials have repeatedly justified their case by charging that Assange put lives at risk; to date, no evidence has surfaced that any individuals were harmed by the leaks (BBC, 12/1/10; Chelsea Manning, Readme.txt, 2022). As the Columbia Journalism Review (12/23/20) admonished, don’t let the Justice Department’s
misdirection around “blown informants” fool you—this case is nothing less than the first time in American history that the US government has sought to prosecute the act of publishing state secrets, something that national security reporters do with some regularity.
US officials have repeatedly justified their case by charging that Assange put lives at risk; to date, no evidence has surfaced that any individuals were harmed by the leaks (BBC, 12/1/10; Chelsea Manning, Readme.txt, 2022). As the Columbia Journalism Review (12/23/20) admonished, don’t let the Justice Department’s
misdirection around “blown informants” fool you—this case is nothing less than the first time in American history that the US government has sought to prosecute the act of publishing state secrets, something that national security reporters do with some regularity.
In failing health after suffering a stroke, Assange has been held in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison since he was removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy in April 2019. He had sought asylum at the embassy in London in 2012 to avoid being sent to Sweden for questioning over sexual assault allegations, because Sweden would not provide assurances it would protect him from extradition to the US. Sweden dropped charges against Assange in November 2019 (BBC, 11/19/19), after he was in British custody.
International condemnation
The Australian diplomatic mission coincided with the convening of the UN General Assembly in New York City, where President Lula da Silva of Brazil condemned the prosecution of Assange, offering yet another opportunity for US corporate media to cover the strong international opposition to Assange’s treatment.
A video (9/19/23) of Lula speaking at the opening of the UN General Assembly was widely circulated on social media. “Preserving press freedom is essential,” Lula declared. “A journalist like Julian Assange cannot be punished for informing society in a transparent and legitimate way.”
Former British ambassador Craig Murray commented about Lula’s reception at the UN (Twitter, 9/17/23):
It is really not normal for the hall at the UN General Assembly to break into this kind of spontaneous applause. The US has been losing the room internationally for a decade. The appalling treatment of Julian is a focus for that.
US media absence
Yet, with a few exceptions (Fox News, 9/20/23; The Hill,9/21/23; Yahoo News, 9/21/23), none of this made the major US news outlets.
Over a week later, Business Insider (10/1/23) ran a long piece that featured an interview with Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s half-brother. It pointed out that Assange had become an obstacle to US plans to involve Australia in its aggression toward China, quoting the PM. But the piece also hashed through a number of long-debunked claims, including one that reminded readers that Mike Pompeo once called Assange “a fugitive Russian asset” (FAIR.org, 12/03/18; Sheerpost 2/25/23), and another that repeated US assertions that WikiLeaks releases would put the US at risk.
The New York Times has been conspicuously absent from the coverage of Assange. Though the Times signed a joint open letter (11/28/22) with four other international newspapers that had worked with Assange and WikiLeaks, appealing to the DoJ to drop its charges, the paper has remained almost entirely silent on both Assange and the issues raised by his continued prosecution since then.
As FAIR pointed out, during the Assange extradition hearing in London, the Times
published only two bland news articles (9/7/20, 9/16/20)—one of them purely about the technical difficulties in the courtroom—along with a short rehosted AP video (9/7/20).
There were no editorials on what the case meant for journalism. FAIR contributor Alan MacLeod noted that the Times seemed to distance itself from Assange and WikiLeaks, and its own reporting on the Cablegate scandal, coverage that boosted the papers’ international reputation.
Other opportunities for coverage have been missed by the Times. For instance, Rep. Rashida Tlaib wrote a letter (4/11/23), signed by six other members of the Progressive Caucus, calling for the DoJ to drop the charges against Assange. Tlaib cited support from the ACLU, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Defending Rights & Dissent and Human Rights Watch, and many others, stating that his prosecution “could effectively criminalize” many “common journalistic practices.” The letter was covered by The Nation (4/14/23), the Intercept (3/30/23), Fox News (4/1/23), The Hill (4/11/23) and Politico (4/11/23), but the Times and other major newspapers were conspicuously silent.
When Assange lost his most recent appeal against extradition in June, a few outlets reported the news online (e.g., AP, 6/9/23; CNN, 6/9/23), but not a single US newspaper report could be found in the Nexis news database. (Newsweek‘s headline framed the news as a “headache for Biden”—6/8/23—rather than a blow for press freedom.) The Times only vaguely referred to the news (Assange “keeps losing appeals”) two weeks later in a feature (6/18/23) on the late whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who had criticized Biden’s decision not to drop the case against Assange.
The world is watching
A huge collective breath is being held as the world watches to see what will happen to Assange, the most famous publisher on the globe. Will he be returned to his country and his family by Christmas, as the Australian MPs have requested? Or will Britain and the US continue to slowly execute him?
Assange’s case is expected to be discussed during Prime Minister Albanese’s current visit to the US, which includes a state dinner hosted by Biden on October 25. MP Monique Ryan, part of the pro-Assange delegation, told news outlets: “Our prime minister needs to see this as a test case for standing up to the US government. There are concerns among Australians about the AUKUS agreement, and whether we have any agency” (Business Insider, 10/1/23).
As Common Dreams (9/19/23) quoted from the delegation’s letter:
We believe the right and best course of action would be for the United States’ Department of Justice to cease its pursuit and prosecution of Julian Assange…. It is well and truly time for this matter to end, and for Julian Assange to return home.
I read with interest Liam Mannix’s report in yesterday’s edition of The Sydney Morning Herald regarding the new nuclear medicine factory but was surprised that with his scientific knowledge he did not question the need for this facility so aptly described as a factory
27 Sept 23
Mannix would be well aware that the medical profession worldwide is turning away from reactor generated medicine due to its inherently dangerous and risky nature and its extremely high manufacturing costs
The isotopes generated by reactors for medical purposes such as at Lucas Heights are being replaced mainly by cyclotron produced isotopes but also other alternatives which are completely free of any risk to the patients and can be produced by relatively easier and safer means at a greatly reduced cost than at Lucas Heights
The only reason that isotopes produced by nuclear reactors are used for medical purposes is that their manufacture is invariably highly and unrealistically subsidised by government grants as is the case with ANSTO in Australia which is globally a prime example of that largesse .
The rapid growth in the international use of cyclotron isotopes for medical therapies is making the production of isotopes by nuclear reactors (like at Lucas Heights) obsolete
As a result there is now need for a new facility for the continued production of isotopes for medical purposes by ANSTO and in fact the current production at Lucas Heights could be stopped immediately with huge savings in government expenditure and no effect on the provision of medical therapies due to the use of much safer alternatives
ANSTO is claiming that the major part of its existence representing 80% of its undertaking is the current production of nuclear medicine isotopes by using its OPAL reactor at Lucas Heights for that purpose but this appears to be no more than a self perpetuating exercise to justify its survival
It is therefore a completely nonsensical if not deliberately disingenuous statement by Science Minister Ed Husic to claim that the “nuclear medicine precinct (of ANSTO) in Sydney will revolutionise the domestic production of nuclear medicines and improve the lives of thousands of Australians”
On the Beach, Nevil Shute’s 1957 book, was recently staged by the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) in a two-act adaptation by playwright Tommy Murphy (Significant Others, Gwen in Purgatory, Holding the Man). The show was directed by Kip Williams, the STC’s artistic director.
Shute’s story is set in the Australian city of Melbourne in 1963—in other words, a few years into the future—following a devastating nuclear war in the northern hemisphere, and what are the final months of human civilisation. All human life has been wiped out in North America, Europe, China and the Soviet Union, and a deadly radiation cloud is moving southward towards Australia.
City residents, along with the captain and crew of the visiting American nuclear submarine USS Scorpion, are preparing for their inevitable deaths with only state-sanctioned suicide pills to ease their final days…………………………….
Shute’s novel was an immediate financial success in 1957, selling over a hundred thousand copies in the first weeks after its publication, and quickly becoming an international best seller. Twelve years after the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, millions of people around the world were deeply concerned about the possibility of nuclear war.
US director Stanley Kramer acquired the rights and the movie, shot in Melbourne and featuring some of Hollywood’s greats—Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins—was released in 1959. “It was a fictional scenario,” Gardner said of the film, “but my God, everyone in the cast and crew knew it [nuclear war] could happen… I was proud of being part of this film.”
Other film and television productions have since been made. These include a made-for-television version in 2000 with Armand Assante, Rachel Ward, and Bryan Brown, followed by a full-cast audio dramatisation in 2008. In 2013, Lawrence Johnston directed Fallout, a documentary about the production of the Kramer’s film.
The STC’s staging of On the Beach—the first ever theatrical production—is timely and politically significant. Its four-week season at the 800-seat Roslyn Packer Theatre in central Sydney was well attended, indicating that Shute’s frightening story still resonates, not just with those who read it in the late 1950s, but for a new generation.
In fact, the ongoing and increasingly public speculation by government and military officials about the possible use of nuclear weapons in the US-led NATO war against Russia in the Ukraine, make Shute’s novel even more relevant than when it was released. Likewise, the Albanese government’s deepening involvement in US-led preparations for war against China, with multi-billion dollar purchases of nuclear submarines and other deadly weaponry, and the hosting of major military exercises in northern Australia, is encountering growing popular opposition.
Underpinning Shute’s book is his determination to raise awareness about the possibility and dangers of nuclear war. This is effectively presented in the opening pastiche of the STC production that gives a real sense of the impending danger that drives the author’s narrative………………………………………………………………………………………
On the flap of a 2010 edition of the novel, a Guardian reviewer rightly states, “On the Beach played an important role in raising awareness about the threat of nuclear war. We stared into the abyss and then stepped back from the brink.”
Rather than circumventing the crises “currently staring us in the face” or creating “a sense of hope,” as Williams suggests, Shute directly confronts his readers with the cataclysmic consequences of inaction……………………………………………………………………………………. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/08/31/nlzx-a31.html —
The Australian Financial Review says the question of why nuclear power isn’t the right solution for Australia deserves a serious answer.
Fair enough.
The Financial Review argues the rest of the world is moving to nuclear. An odd claim, when the world added 295GW of wind and solar last year but just 1.5GW of nuclear power. The International Energy Agency predicts that “only a small number of units are likely to start operating this decade”.
In fact, there are five serious answers to why nuclear is the wrong solution for Australia.
When thinking about the conundrum of how we manage this massive transformation to a lower-emissions energy grid, it is hard to think of a more ill-fitting solution for Australia than going down the nuclear road.
No.1 issue: cost. Proponents of nuclear energy simply dismiss the multitude of evidence that nuclear power is the most expensive form of energy available. Or, worse, seek to undermine the rigorous independent analysis that finds it so.
GenCost, independently prepared by the CSIRO and Australian Energy Market Operator, is one of many studies which find nuclear the most expensive form of energy. Despite the political attacks on AEMO and CSIRO in recent weeks, it is a robust report and their analysis stands up to scrutiny.
As AEMO has said: “Recent media commentary that AEMO’s Integrated System Plan (ISP) does not include transmission and storage, as well as generation costs associated with providing electricity to Australian customers, is wrong.” And the finding is clear: renewables (including the cost of transmission and storage) are cheaper than nuclear by several multiples.
If you don’t like the work of AEMO and CSIRO, sure, look around for an alternative report. Take a recent report by Lazard on the levelised cost of energy in the US. It found that between 2009 and 2021, utility-scale solar costs came down 90 per cent and wind 72 per cent, while new nuclear costs increased by 36 per cent.
Small modular reactors (SMRs) can supply up to 300 megawatts per plant. They are conservatively costed at $5 billion each. You need quite a few 300MW SMRs to replace say a 2GW coal-fired power station like Eraring. That is an extremely expensive transaction. The leader of the Nationals has said nuclear power wouldn’t cost Australia “a cent”. How can an alternative government make such a ridiculous claim with a straight face?
2. Second, the much-vaunted small modular reactor technology is unproven. There is no commercial SMR operating anywhere in the world. There are two demonstration plants: one floating around on a barge in Russia and one in China.
Last week’s Financial Review editorial lauds Ontario’s plans. Really? Ontario Power Generation has not released any costings for its proposed SMRs and it is yet to receive (or even apply for) environmental approvals. Are we to hang our hat on this technology for our national energy plan?
3. Third, nuclear is notoriously slow to build. Can anyone credibly claim that Australia could have a nuclear plant operating by the early or even mid-2030s, when we need no-emissions technology to be supplying the vast bulk of our power? The answer to that question, reasonable observers would agree, is “no”.
4. inflexibility. The fourth serious answer to the Financial Review’s suggestion of a nuclear path is that it is not a flexible source of energy. As we move to more renewables, we need peaking and firming that can be tuned on and off at short notice to fill gaps in renewable supply. Coal-fired power stations can be turned down, but not off. Likewise, a nuclear power station cannot easily be turned off once it is running.
Nuclear power is largely useless as peaking and firming support for renewables. This is where gas-fired power stations are a useful back-up to renewables. The latest technology allows gas-fired power stations to be turned on with two minutes’ notice.
5. Finally, there’s the matter of nuclear waste. Small modular reactors would produce no small amount of waste. A Stanford University study finds that “… most small modular reactor designs will actually increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30 for the reactors …”
For 235 years, Australia has searched for comparative advantage. We have found one. It is renewable energy. Imagine having abundant resources of the cheapest form of energy available and choosing, as a matter of policy, to deploy a source of energy much more expensive and slower to build instead? That’s what advocates of nuclear power are arguing for.
After 10 years of denial and delay on climate action, I’m not interested in more years of distraction by a debate on an energy source which clearly doesn’t stack up for our country.
Why does this matter? It’s lazy journalism, bad editing, and is typical of the inflated hopium of the nuclear booster industry.
Just one example: Coalition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien said this week that Canada sources 60 per cent of its power from nuclear. Not true, it is 15 per cent, and falling.
should we expect better from the nation’s business daily?
The Australian Financial Review has been trying to make a big thing about nuclear power, and small modular reactors in particular. But it seems its ideological enthusiasm for the technology is trumping its fact checking capabilities.
To read the AFR series you’d be forgiven for thinking that SMRs already exist in western grids. Everything is in the present tense, as though the machines are already operating, or in commercial production.
Of course, that’s not the case. The first SMRs are unlikely to be built much before the end of the decade, and it could be years after that before they represent a commercial alternative, if then.
But it’s not just the fake tenses that detract from the AFR’s journalism, it’s the facts, or the lack of them, that grate the most.
Let’s take the latest instalment on the progress of SMRs in Canada, written by the paper’s Washington correspondent. We’ve taken a screen shot of the opening paragraphs of the online article above. [on original]
“By the end of the decade it (the Ontario government utility) expects to begin generation up to 1.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to supply 1.2 million homes with carbon-free energy,” it proclaims.
Er, no. The minister’s statement announcing the expanded program of a single 300MW SMR to four SMRs totalling 1.2GW makes it very clear that the three additional units won’t be online until 2034 or 2036.
That means, by the end of the decade, there might be one, sized at 300MW and it will only serve 300,000 customers.
That’s important because the nuclear fan club likes to make out the SMRs are not far away and mass deployment is at hand, and that we – Australia – can afford to stop wind and solar and wait.
But it’s clear that even in Canada – one of the biggest and most established users of nuclear in the world, with all the experience and regulatory and grid infrastructure – the authorities can’t see a second unit coming on line until the mid 2030s.
That misinformation certainly fooled the person responsible for the “key statistics” box on the right hand side of the AFR article (above on original)) – which is designed to be a ready reference for those not bothered to read the article itself and in this case is completely misleading.
It tells readers that 1.2 million households will be served by the first SMR. No they won’t. The official release makes clear it is 300,000.
The key statistics box in the AFR article says there will be a total of 1.2 million gigawatts of nuclear. No, just 1.2 gigawatts, eventually. That’s one million times less than what is claimed by the AFR. Maybe just a blooper. But it is more than just a few zeros.
Why does this matter? It’s lazy journalism, bad editing, and is typical of the inflated hopium of the nuclear booster industry.
It’s perhaps telling that the only US politician the AFR quotes in support of nuclear is Vivek Ramaswamy – who shares conspiracy theories about 9/11, blames the recent Hawaii bush fires on “woke water” policies, and reckons Donald Trump has been the greatest US president of the 21st Century.
Ramaswamy, like the other seven Republican candidates in their primary debate this week, did not put his hand up when asked if he accepted climate science. “The climate change agenda is a hoax,” he added. Climate denial and nuclear boosterism often go hand in hand, because it is essentially about a delay to renewables.
Ramaswamy went further: “Unlock American energy, drill, frack, burn coal, embrace nuclear,” he declared. And this is the AFR’s go-to man in the US to push the nuclear argument.
Some might argue Ramaswamy’s “drill, frack and burn” mantra could be a fair summary of the AFR’s own view of the world. It’s not a view that is shared by the bulk of its business readers.
But neither is nuclear – it’s a marginal proposition at best. The Australian energy industry has looked its costs and decided no thanks, it’s too slow and too expensive. As the former head of the US nuclear regulatory commission observed, the drive for nuclear is – more than anything – about ideology.
Of course, the AFR is not the only source of misinformation in this new campaign for nuclear, nor is it the most egregious.
The rot starts at the top. The Coalition – which wants wind and solar stopped while we wait for SMRs – is not the least bit bothered by facts. Just one example: Coalition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien said this week that Canada sources 60 per cent of its power from nuclear. Not true, it is 15 per cent, and falling.
The Murdoch media does its bit, of course, but it is the social media campaign against renewables and for nuclear that is more insidious, and more outrageous – with sometimes absurd claims about wind turbines (they can’t spin by themselves and have to be powered by coal) and solar doing the rounds.
That campaign, depressingly, has taken root – and little more can be expected from the sometimes toxic nature of social media channels, Sky after Dark and even the “mainstream” Murdoch publications. But should we expect better from the nation’s business daily?
With Hiroshima Day this Sunday, 6 August, (and Nagasaki Day on 9 August) plus the cinema release of Oppenheimer, there’s no better time to highlight Australia’s longest running show about nuclear issues – Radio Active.
Canberra’s oldest community radio station, 2XXFM 98.3, airs the program every Sunday morning and, sadly, nuclear issues are just as topical now as they were when the show started in 1976.
According to the Doomsday Clock, which was created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons), it is 90 seconds to midnight.
The Doomsday Clock is set every year and has become a universally recognised indicator of the world’s vulnerability to global catastrophe caused by man-made technologies.
This ticking clock feeds the longevity of Radio-Active. Canberra’s 2XXFM is one of 20 community radio stations broadcasting the show around Australia for the past 47 years.
The show is produced at Melbourne’s community radio station 3CR by producer Michaela Stubbs.
“All of the show’s presenters are activists, which is probably why the show has gone on for so long because we have quite a big movement that is multi-generational and we’re really passionate about the issues,” Michaela says. “My mum was part of the peace and nuclear disarmament movement in the ‘80s so I had an awareness of Hiroshima Day.”
Michael has a vast archive of tapes to draw from and recently aired a show about “Down Winders”, people affected by the Trinity nuclear test site in New Mexico, USA, the site of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon.
“That was such an important story,” Michaela says. “They are the voices that don’t get heard.”
There are also old cassettes of protests such as Australia’s Jabiluka blockades in the ‘70s against the Jabiluka uranium mine in the Northern Territory.
Michaela recently interviewed an Indigenous woman whose family was affected by the British Government atomic tests at Emu Field, South Australia. This occurred 70 years ago this October and her family is still seeking reparations.
“We have always had a strong focus on amplifying the voices of people who are directly impacted by nuclear development,” Michaela says.
Australia’s longest running show on nuclear issues also focuses on peace and sustainability. Radio-Active is broadcast on Canberra community radio 2XXFM 98.3 every Sunday, 7.30am-8am.
The right’s nuclear stupidity is enough to make us cough up Phlegm Orville ( Bernard Keane and Crikey )
President Macron has reversed France’s original plan to reduce its nuclear energy from 70% to 50%, indeed as part of a nuclear renaissance, France will build six new large reactors and shortly commence testing on a nuclear power plant in Phlegm Orville, which is set to open early next year.
Er, what? Phlegm Orville in France? Sounds like a haute cuisine serving of mucus. Presumably the IPA scribe misheard when Dutton referred to Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant (thank God he didn’t refer to Finland’s Olkiluoto). Or perhaps they couldn’t believe Dutton was seriously invoking Flamanville as an advertisement for the wisdom of nuclear power.
Crikey first mentioned the new reactor being built at Flamanville in 2009, when it was due to open in 2013 and was already one-third over budget. By 2016 it was 200% over budget and scheduled to start in 2018. By 2018, the builder EDF discovered serious construction problems that delayed the start until 2020, and blew the budget out again. In 2020, the French government labelled Flamanville a “mess”. Early in 2022, when it was going to open at the end of the year, there was another delay and the budget rose to €12.7 billion (A$21.3 billion). At the end of last year, there was another delay into 2024 and the budget went over €13 billion.
So, all up, a decade overdue, and a final cost triple the initial estimate — if it starts next year. And it’s what Dutton thinks is an advertisement for nuclear power. Perhaps he should have mentioned Olkiluoto instead. It finally commenced in April this year… 14 years overdue.
Such criticisms, however, are now airily dismissed by nuclear power advocates. The future is small modular reactors (SMRs), which take much less time to build and are far cheaper — even if there are none actually operating outside Russia or China yet. “A single SMR can power some 300,000 homes. A microreactor could power a regional hospital, a factory, a mining site or a military base,” Dutton told the IPA.
At the same time as Dutton is spruiking SMRs, the Financial Review is as well. It’s run a three-part series on plans in Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom for SMRs (as one AFR reader acerbically noted, the keyword is “plans”).
The AFR also editorialised about the glories of SMRs. Conveniently absent, however, was the fact that even the new wonder technology needs massive taxpayer subsidies. The SMR that gets advocates most excited is the small prototype that US firm NuScale received regulatory approval to build in Idaho earlier this year — celebrated as a major milestone for the technology. Except it won’t commence operation until 2030 at the earliest and has already received US$1.4 billion in subsidies. That hasn’t stopped the proposed facility’s cost per MW-hour already increasing by more than 50% — three times the current cost of large-scale nuclear power in the US.
Why has the cost gone up for this SMR? Because, erm… cough cough… there’s been a massive blowout in the construction cost: 75%, to more than US$9 billion. Sure, it’s not a Phlegm Orville 300% blowout, but it is only a small reactor. And who will insure SMRs? In the United States, the government provides that insurance, with nuclear power plant owners paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year in premiums, further adding to the cost.
Another issue not mentioned by either the AFR or Dutton — both of whom like to whine about too much government spending — is what to do with the waste produced by SMRs. See, while they may be small, SMRs produce much more waste per unit of energy produced — and waste with higher radioactivity levels — than normal reactors. Good luck finding somewhere to store that for 10,000 years. You can bet no company will be doing that — it will fall to taxpayers, yet again.
So, apart from taking a long time to build, blowing out costs, requiring a massive infrastructure solution in terms of waste disposal and requiring colossal taxpayer support, the SMRs championed by Dutton and the AFR are completely different to traditional nuclear power.
What’s driving all this? Why does the right think SMRs are the solution? The delays that are typical of nuclear power, and which would be typical of SMRs as well, aren’t the problem — they’re the point. Switching focus to nuclear power and away from renewables and storage would delay decarbonisation and give fossil fuel industries extra years — indeed, extra decades — to keep operating while a nuclear “solution” was prepared. Like carbon capture, like gas, it’s another scam used by fossil fuel interests to try to delay meaningful climate action.
The mainstream media has once more tried to generate alarm about the presence of two relatively innocuous Chinese electronic spy ships in international waters during the latest biennial Talisman Sabre military exercise spread across the Australian mainland and offshore oceans. It involves 30,000 troops from 13 countries. Although the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi had publicly assured his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese that his country would attend, India did not turn up.
The unnamed enemy is China. A London based journalist reported from Townsville that the latest exercise was occurring against a “changing security landscape in which China grows evermore belligerent”. Apparently, he didn’t see any need to give evidence for this dubious claim. The defence minister, Richard Marles said Talisman Sabre provided an opportunity to practice “high-end” warfare. Just how participants such as PNG, Tonga and Fiji can do this is not clear. In a war, their role would be to let the US operate from their territory.
During the last exercise, the ABC’s national television news each night ran a video of the spy ships across the top of the screen. It hasn’t gone that far this time, but has given extensive coverage to the spy ships without explaining what harm they might be doing.
The participants don’t seem alarmed. During the last exercise, an ABC journalist asked an American soldier on an amphibious ship if he was worried about the presence of Chinese spy ships. He replied, “No, we do it to them and they do it to us”. An Australian military spokesman said this time that it had taken the appropriate precautions to ensure the spy ships don’t cause any harm. A core reason is that all signals traffic is encrypted. The reality is that the US and its allies conduct electronic intelligence gathering on a much greater scale than China can. The Pine Gap satellite ground station in central Australia, for example, generates billions of pieces of intelligence every day. This did not stop the ABC defence correspondent Andrew Green commenting on the activities of one Chinese spy ship, “If knowledge is power, China has just become more powerful”.
The RAAF’s P8A Poseidon electronic spy planes pose an aggressive threat to China by dropping sonar buoys in the South China Sea where its submarines are based on Hainan island close to the mainland. The small buoys contain an underwater microphone to pick up the sounds from submarines and relay the data to the spy planes conducting surveillance for potential military use.
Australia’s behaviour in the South China Sea is the same as if Chinese planes dropped sonar buoys outside the Fremantle base for Australian and US submarines. But the Chinese planes don’t do this. …………………………………………………………………………………
Certainly, Australian media would consider it provocative if China developed a long-range air capability and dropped sonar buoys off the submarine base at Fremantle. Albanese portrays the co-operation between the US and Australia to conduct potentially aggressive military activities in the South China Sea as part of the struggle between autocracies and democracy. Unfortunately, the draconian nature of some of Australia’s national security laws, deprive Australia of the right to call itself a liberal democracy.
Similar problems arise with Albanese’s iron grip on the Labor party’s federal conference in Brisbane on August 17-19. Although he describes Labor as a democratic party, he has effectively banned any parliamentarians attending the conference from supporting motions in favour of scrapping the AUKUS pact or the acquisition of nuclear submarines. Albanese has also banned any parliamentarian from supporting the existing conference policy of making it a priority to recognise of Palestine as a state. https://johnmenadue.com/australian-medias-alarm-over-chinese-spy-ship-highlights-stark-double-standard/
‘Hugely significant’: Australia to manufacture and export missiles to US’ (SMH)
‘Australia to manufacture and export missiles to US and others’ (9 News)
‘US to help Australia develop guided missiles by 2025’ (Aljazeera)
Above are just a few of the rapturous headlines in the print media. Then the joyous Australian TV and radio media – orgasmic delight at Australia’s new subservience to USA militarism.
BUT – by today – 204 comments on thed Sydney Morning Herald’s delighted article by Matthew Knott. July 28, 2023. Yes quite a few comments rejoicing in the prospect of the missiles industry . BUT the overwhelming majority of commentators were disgusted. Below are some of the comments.
Australia will be the front line in a US war with China
And make Australia a target for attacks un-necessarily ? Australia should NOT be drawn into any activity that is war-like in nature. We are a peaceful country that should not be militarily engaged in other nations issues. Sure we can have a voice BUT NOT ACT MILITARILY .. If the Americans want to stick their nose in other nation’s affairs, so be it .. Don’t drag us in militarily !!!
We voted Labor and they are throwing any semblance of autonomy we had away.Terrible idea !We can’t make Under Pants, Socks, Kettles, Washing Machines, Dustpans.
The Syrian war and Ukraine wars have generated 10 million refugees who have fled into the rest of Europe. The South China Sea has 200 million people living within 10 km of the coastline. Australians were easily convinced to turn back the boats and create a cruel offshore detention program all for the expediency of the LNP’s re election. The obsession with contributing to the US led arms race and the insistence of provoking a war over Taiwan will inevitably lead to our shiny new missiles and military arsenal being used as an expediency to turn back the thousands of boats
Just how (and why) are we finding the capacity to make death ? More military lunacy.
We can’t make Under Pants, Socks, Kettles, Washing Machines, Dustpans.
Just how (and why) are we finding the capacity to make death ?
We can’t make Under Pants, Socks, Kettles, Washing Machines, Dustpans.
Just how (and why) are we finding the capacity to make death ?As Fraser said, we should have got out of Anzus at the end of the Cold War. Seems now we’re more captured by the US’s foreign policy agenda than ever before.
For Labor it’s clearly about the domestic optics. They want to be seen as the tough guy on military and defence matters, so long that being the Coalition’s political play.
Because of Morrison, and no Choice. We ended up with ALBO the United States Cheerleader.
Albo will NOT provide leadership and he will not provide intellectual input in the following areas; •‘Made a public call for building an autonomous Australia in a persistent attempt to shake off Australia’s shackles and prove that it is not the vassal of The United States. •that Australia should be one pole of multipolarity with its own independent position to serve its own interests, and cannot be a vassal of other forces, •When dealing with its relations with the US, it is hoped that Australia can truly safeguard its own core interests and get rid of the shackles the US has placed on it in the fields of economy, trade, ideology and even security, Finally he has no idea on how to make Australia a world class manufacturing hub as declared in his election policy speech.
I’d much rather see Australia manufacturing things like solar panels and wind turbines and exporting them to the rest of the world to help tackle the growing threat of global climate change. Instead we focus on weapons and the machinery of war. Strange priorities from a Labor government…..disappointing really!
Big cheers for this ‘Hugely significant’!!! We finally became like North Korea, soon we will be able to replace New Year celebrations with real deadly missiles.
With the added bonus for politicians: whenever they make a mess they just fire missiles to distract the electorates … and at the same time it would be ‘Hugely Great’. The Rednecks and war mongers will be cheering all the way … it’s win win… well done Albo
We are being conned. Can we go back to making cars. At least they were useful. Missiles are for war. Unless we agree to annilate all Mankind we are walking down the wrong path. In a car you can go somewhere.
And so the violence industry marches on. By setting such an example is it little wonder there is so much killing & maiming in the world today?
So now new funding just extending the Morrison/Dutton Missile manufacturing policy announced in 2021?
Will it be like the F18 program all over again – assembling kits from the US? How much will the taxpayer subsidise the program?
So we’ve been sold out to the military industrial complex and will become fully integrated into the US War machine as the US makes its last ditch attempt to maintain its global hegemony and it control over the pacific region. We are being marched into WWIII by the crazy neo cons in the USA and we are too blind to see it, chanting USA, USA, USA as we are led like lambs to the slaughter.
Unbelievable.
How are we a ‘peaceful country’ – name a war we HAVEN’T been involved in! We’re sycophants, hiding under the US’s skirt.
After being a gigantic quarry for so many years, our new major export industry will be providing weapons of war.
This is shameful. Surely we have the intelligence and foresight to do better than this.
Unbelievable.
After being a gigantic quarry for so many years, our new major export industry will be providing weapons of war.
This is shameful. Surely we have the intelligence and foresight to do better than this.
This is a step up from days of Lithgow Small-Arms .303s and these days, our Bushmasters. We’ll just be making them here to another nation’s specs & IP, all for the promise of jobs.
Blinken & Bush: “We have no greater friend, no greater partner, no greater ally than Australia. A charm offensive that Albanese must take heed.
We import foods & goods from our neighbours for survival only for them to be killed by our missiles. How gross!
While the US and Australia are incessantly focusing on arms and the military in the Pacific, China’s hospital ship, the Peace Ark is in Tonga and will depart Nuku’alofa on 4 August 2023. It will also visit Kiribati, Vanuatu, Solomons Islands and Timor-Leste during its mission. The ‘Peace Ark’, on her third goodwill visit to Tonga on a humanitarian medical mission from 28 July to 4 August 2023. So which country is doing more for the people in the Pacific?
American owned, designed, parts supplied. We are just like a 3rd world country assembling stuff, all profits going offshore with no tax paid. What a waste………… And paying for the privilege
And another target added to the growing number of American bases.
..and what about all the bs about becoming self-sustaining after the pandemic when we saw how reliant we are on imports? Or this is suddenly irrelevant? They need a Royal Commission into the capabilities of Australia when another and worse pandemic hits. Oh, I can write the summary now “We will be stuffed – starvation, no drugs, no products”. But yes, focus on warheads. Made with Australian metal I hope? Stick some kangaroo prints on it so when it is dug out of children we can be proud.
Yes, “assembled ‘Down Under’ from imported components subject to our strict specifications so you can rest assured that when you get hit by a genuine ‘Aussie’ missile it’s gonna hurt”…………….. Exactly! How gullible we are to trust the Americans? It’s unbelievable!
Now imagine if an LNP government announced we were making killing things for Uncle Sam. You’d never hear the end of it. Oh the hypocrisy.
Nice not, when we have industry again it is all about weapons and destruction.
What have we become? So we are not making products that will make our life easier and more comfortable? We are not making tools and machines to facilitate our normal daily activities? We are no building metro lines to reduce commute times? We are not making electric vehicles to reduce carbon emissions? Yet we are going to making missiles for wars that will kill human beings. What a weird sense of priority we’ve got ???
Lloyd Austin moved from the board of Raytheon to Secretary of Defence. Is it any wonder we are now getting sucked into arms manufacturing a cycle of endless wars, which is a bona fide policy of the US. We need to be much more discerning than “all the way with Uncle Sam” this is a very poor sign of our priorities, and the “jobs and growth” mantra has been taken from the liberal playbook to justify this stupid and dangerous choice.
So the plan is to continue a longstanding trend to make us even more financially and militarily dependent on foreigners right?
“Sydneysiders are aghast at the level of gun violence breaking out. On to happier news, Australia is going to create its very own missile manufacturing plants”.RESPECT8
We’re being used again, it won’t be to our advantage everything the US does is for theirs. We are their lapdog. The anti-China brigade in Canberra is pushing hard to get Labor to think China wants to go to war & so we have to be closely allied with the US.
NO it is the USA that always wants to go to war – look how many we’ve followed them into and look at China, only min-wars or skirmishes on their borders, never ever far afield.
I think this idea stinks.
ALP – American Lapdog Party
What is hugely significant is Albo’s lost his marbles.
No way. To restore our manufacturing capacity, I’d rather prefer we start making electric vehicles and solar panels, not missiles.
We’re becoming completely dependant upon the American military machine. AUKUS are about all our government seems to care about anymore. Meanwhile… over 1 million young people are living in poverty and koalas are going extinct. It’s all about priorities and it’s 100% obvious what and who our leaders are working for and it ain’t the people or the country. With friends like Labor, who needs Liberals?
Who cares what Simon Birmingham thinks, or says.
He represents a government that made defence decisions that were more photo-op than substance; cancelled the SEA1000 project that put us squarely into the ship-building “Valley of Death” that the COALition hyperventilated over; failed abysmally in both defence and foreign policy, all the while telling us what absolute standouts they were in government.
It was the COALition that left us with this mess called AUKUS.
I can’t see us receiving nuclear-powered submarines, despite the efforts to push through with AUKUS. At some point, the taxpayers of Australia will simply say “enough!” The options being offered are far too expensive.
“US defence contracting giants Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have been selected by the government as preferred partners for its guided weapons and explosive ordnance enterprise“. The Hawkei is made by Prime contractors including Thales Australia (French) Boeing (US) Plasan (Israel). The Virginia submarines are designed and built by US General Dynamics Electric Boat (EB) and Huntington Ingalls Industries. Virtually all military equipment purchased or being built in Australia by foreign, usually US companies. Australia is feeding overseas military complexes, not developing anything new.
A gigantic error from the government here. The only priorities here are for shareholders of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. The US are always looking for the next endless war. History repeating itself over and over. We will be used as pawns between the US and China.
Carried away by the logic of one-upmanship that they impose on the world of politics, the media are co-producing Western countries’ progressive entry into the war against Russia. Everything about the way they treat the conflict suggests that such a confrontation is inevitable. This battle of opinion, which began a year ago, is now being waged on three fronts at once. First, the beatification of Zelensky,
Western journalists are all but unanimous that negotiating with Russia would equal forgiving it its aggression. Nothing short of a crushing victory for Ukraine is conscionable. The risk of escalation is rarely mentioned.
Le Monde Diplomatiqe by Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert, Translated by George Miller March 2023
After speeches by British prime minister Rishi Sunak and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky at a joint press conference on 8 February at a military base in southwest England, it was time for questions. BBC Ukraine correspondent Natalia Goncharova greeted Zelensky with, ‘I would really like to hug you, but I’m not allowed.’ Ignoring his security service, Zelensky got down from the podium and embraced her to general applause. Then Goncharova asked Sunak, ‘You know that Ukrainian soldiers are dying every day. Don’t you think that that decision about warplanes is taking too long?’ In 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, the embedding of journalists with the US military had caused some in the profession to wince; 20 years on, in the Ukraine war, it’s become a journalism of the all-out embrace.
In France, too, the code of conduct set out by Hubert Beuve-Méry, founder of the daily Le Monde (and this publication), counselling ‘contact and distance’, has been set aside. At least when it comes to Volodymyr Zelensky: ‘In real life, he’s nice, quite cool, often funny and not at all grudging with his time,’ said Isabelle Lasserre, Le Figaro’s diplomatic correspondent and darling of the media, France Inter and news channel LCI in particular, since she adopted an uncompromising stance on Ukraine. ‘He has an incredible leadership style, a very intense charisma. He gets straight to the point, he always speaks with conviction,’ she told C politique on France 5 (12 February 2023).
Eulogies, hugs, gushing questions: the Western press’s veneration of this president in khaki fatigues suggests media in thrall to political leaders. But that impression is misleading. Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and particularly since Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, ‘journalism’ in the United States and also in Europe has increasingly behaved like an autonomous political force with its own ideological agenda.
Unlike traditional political parties, the media are simultaneously bringing to life and feeding rival tendencies that form two branches of the market for news: one on the hard right (Fox News, The Sun, CNews etc), the other liberal (the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the Guardian, Le Monde etc). With these two audiences, both of which demand their own partisan reading of events, ‘journalism’ is careful not to alienate the faithful by ever making them doubt the bewitching story it serves up.
Media in combat mode have polarised the US around fictitious issues (‘Trump is the Kremlin’s puppet’, ‘Joe Biden’s election victory was rigged’). Since the invasion of Ukraine, they have involved the West in a war against Russia by suppressing any public debate on the risks of military escalation.
This undertaking has been aided by instincts inherited from the cold war: (much-replayed) archive footage of American schoolchildren learning how to protect themselves from a Soviet nuclear attack; a long-standing obsession with communist subversion in the US; and recurrent paranoia about the ‘enemy within’.
It was conceivable, though, that the demise of the Soviet Union and the election of a president who enjoyed strong support in the West, and was almost servile towards it — Boris Yeltsin — would call for more cordial relations between the two former protagonists in a confrontation that had become futile. The Russian people longed for this just as much as their leaders: in the early 1990s, when former Soviet citizens were asked about their favourite international partner, 74% of them picked the US (1).
To ensure US hegemony
This enthusiasm was not mutual. US politicians and media treated Russia as a defeated country, whose role was to not only bend to the rules of then-triumphant neoliberal capitalism, but also to remain strategically weak so that no hostile power could ever again threaten US hegemony. In 1992, only a few weeks after the end of the Soviet Union, the leaked draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), better known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, a Pentagon document that the press published immediately, already had Russia in its sights. It stated that Washington would henceforth need to ‘refocus on precluding the emergence of any future global competitor’. The power of American ‘conviction’ would be all the more compelling because the Pentagon promised to back it up with a military capable of ‘preclud[ing] hostile competitors from challenging our critical interests’ (2). However, ‘the master of the Kremlin’ was then Boris Yeltsin, not Vladimir Putin.
But that barely mattered, because with rare exceptions — notably Saudi Arabia and Israel — the US and its media were almost equally inflexible towards and dismissive of their puppets (Yeltsin), their ‘allies’ (European states) and their enemies (China, Russia, Iran). The idea in the Wolfowitz Doctrine that the international order is ultimately guaranteed by the United States and that the US must be in a position to ‘act independently, as necessary’ when international support is ‘sluggish or inadequate’ was the consensus in the State Department, Washington think tanks and newsrooms. This imperial prism explains the unquestioning acceptance with which all American wars, including the most illegal ones, have been greeted by Fox News and the New York Times.
Journalists have gone back to basics. In the Ukraine war, Chinese, Indian, Latin American, Arab or African viewpoints don’t count?
So Russians gradually became disenchanted with the West…………and NATO’s ongoing expansion, together with the experience of privatisation, finally convinced the Russian public that the US intended, if not to ‘humiliate’ Russia, then at least to subordinate it. ……….
In the US, the construction of the Russian enemy had proceeded in parallel as disagreements and tensions between the two former superpowers grew. ………………………………………….
‘Trump, Putin’s lackey’
Much inanity flowed from this belief. And the European media picked up most of it…………………………………………………….
The US mainstream media’s war on Trump illustrated the transformation of the news business into a political force………………………………………………….
……..journalist Jeff Gerth, who spent three decades on the New York Times, recently published a rolling investigation of the media’s Russiagate coverage in the respected Columbia Journalism Review (5). This mountain of fake news, whose main purveyors were the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, asserted that, without collusion between Trump and Putin, Clinton would have been sitting in the Oval Office. Unfortunately for them, after two years of investigation, special prosecutor Robert Mueller, a darling of the Democrats, burst this bubble and disproved any collusion (6). The Washington Post even had to correct several of its scoops and take down the most grotesque fabrications from its website.
The Columbia Journalism Review’s investigation can be read like a textbook of journalistic errors: elision of information that doesn’t corroborate a reporter’s thesis, a competitive race for scoops at the expense of rigour, passing off as ‘Russian disinformation’ stories that are true but embarrassing to the Democrats, the misleading presentation of statistics, misuse of anonymous sources (a thousandfold during the Trump era) vaguely described as ‘administration officials’ or ‘intelligence officials’.
Misleading use of statistics
Even when the agencies corrected or denied the information they had published, the press, acting as an autonomous political force, went on to make doctored ‘revelations’ to keep up the pressure on the White House. ……………………………………………….
As if to confirm this damning indictment of the press, the media outlets involved greeted Gerth’s investigation with stony silence, no doubt confident that their readers would rather have their convictions reaffirmed than be disabused. The result, Gerth explained, is that a profession that is highly influential in public life faces no penalty when it goes wrong……………………………….
Russiagate had turned questions about a ‘Russian threat’ into a domestic political weapon; the media emerged from it discredited. But the war in Ukraine saved them in a sense. It enabled them to recycle their obsession, this time based on real aggression and in a more favourable political context, since both US parties agree that their country should be arming Ukraine against Russia for as long as it takes.
The cult of ‘Western values’
A similar consensus exists in Europe. The 1999 Kosovo war had already seen Germany’s Greens commit themselves wholeheartedly to NATO; even today, the most fervent support for Kyiv is found among the liberal left and environmentalist groups that were once tempted by pacifism. . For these educated sections of society, defending Ukraine is a secular religion: journalists, high priests of the cult of ‘Western values’, preach the salvation of progressive souls at last mobilised against Moscow’s imperialism. Putin’s nationalist diatribes and reactionary traditionalism encourage this militancy, as does the presence of a Democrat in the White House.
The almost total absence of dissenting voices within the ‘progressive’ universe is also partly explained by the price exacted for straying from the bellicose line that is asserted with almost imperceptible shades of difference by LCI and France 2, Médiapart and Paris Match, L’Opinion and Politis, RTL and France Inter. Any reservation expressed about the general mobilisation for Ukraine sparks controversy or scandal,………………………………………………………………
This question gives rise to others. Why do the hosts of this morning show have guests who are almost unanimously in favour of increasing military aid to Kyiv: François Hollande, Bernard Guetta, Isabelle Lasserre, Pierre Servent etc? Why is it that from 8pm on LCI, under the leadership of Darius Rochebin (an admirer of Bernard-Henri Lévy), ‘debates’ on Ukraine assemble panels of Atlanticist journalists (a rotating cast of Pierre Servent, Isabelle Lasserre and Nicolas Tenzer), former NATO researchers (Samantha de Bendern), an exiled ‘former KGB agent’ and Ukrainian activists? Why do magazine covers look like leaflets distributed in Kyiv (‘Ukraine must win’, ran the headline in L’Express on 16 February 2023)? Why do reporters make do so often with simply illustrating a story devised in newsrooms in Paris and why, finally, do editorials only add a patina of respectability to this crusading tone?
It is as if everyone had agreed there is only one possible foreign policy, the policy being pursued by Ursula von der Leyen and the US State Department, and summed up by the German foreign minister on 25 January: ‘We’re waging a war against Russia’. The absence of pluralism is all the more noticeable because any leftwing opponents stay silent or invisible (8). …………….. journalists have gone back to basics. In the Ukraine war, Chinese, Indian, Latin American, Arab or African viewpoints don’t count
Carried away by the logic of one-upmanship that they impose on the world of politics, the media are co-producing Western countries’ progressive entry into the war against Russia. Everything about the way they treat the conflict suggests that such a confrontation is inevitable. This battle of opinion, which began a year ago, is now being waged on three fronts at once. First, the beatification of Zelensky, who has become the most famous influencer on the planet, to the extent that no book fair, film festival or American football match can claim success without his blessing via video link.
……………………………………………………………..The fear of offending Kyiv sometimes borders on self-censorship: when the New York Times ran a story online initially headlined ‘Ukraine corruption scandal stokes longstanding aid concerns in US’ (27 January 2023), it was immediately amended to read: ‘US officials overseeing aid say Ukrainian leaders are tackling corruption.’
The West’s sanctions campaign
The second front is the campaign to destroy Russia economically and militarily through sanctions and stepping up arms deliveries to Ukraine in the form of artillery, missiles, tanks and fighter planes. Not content with brushing aside the debate on the dangers of such a military escalation, the media equate any idea of negotiation with giving Moscow a full pardon (shades of Munich, 1938). As for economic retaliation, they are reluctant to admit their relative failure;…………………………………………………………..
The third front, which is probably most effective because least visible, is the avoidance of any historical perspective on the conflict and unfolding events. When France Inter’s geopolitics commentator Pierre Haski, who is also the president of Reporters Without Borders, rightly accused the Russians of ‘hitting cities and infrastructure’ (14 February 2023), he failed to point out that this is precisely what NATO did during the war in Kosovo. ………………………………………
The idea that other people might compare Russian imperialism to that of the US — wars without a UN mandate in Kosovo and Iraq, Washington’s denunciation of several disarmament agreements with Moscow, embargoes and boycotts against Cuba and Iran, extra-judicial executions by drone, the persecution of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning — is unwelcome in most newsrooms. As a result, these Western decisions are erased from memory or treated as exceptions, not part of a pattern.
………………………………………………. But the biased presentation of history does not just impoverish Westerners’ ability to judge the ongoing war. It also renders less comprehensible the reaction of other peoples who are aware of facts that their media are willing to tell them. For Arabs, Africans or Latin Americans, the assertion that Ukraine is ‘fighting for our values’ (11) can only reawaken memories of the Iraq war. At the time when the US was preparing to invade that country on a false prospectus, it received the support of eight European leaders — from the Czech Republic, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the UK, Hungary, Poland and Denmark — in the form of a joint letter published in the Wall Street Journal on 30 January 2003. It began, ‘The real bond between the United States and Europe is the values we share: democracy, individual freedom, human rights and the Rule of Law.’ The result: a country destroyed and hundreds of thousands of lives lost.
Does this mean that beyond Ukraine, other acts of aggression, massive destruction, violations of people’s right to self-determination have not aroused the same indignation, the same batteries of sanctions, the same abundance of military assistance to the besieged country? Silence in the ranks! https://mondediplo.com/2023/03/08media
“……………………………….. the nuclear threat is still very much at the top of our collective mind.
The Sydney Theatre Company is staging the very first stage adaptation of Shute’s novel “On the Beach”. And Oppenheimer, one of 2023’s two most-hyped films, tells the story of the man referred to as “the father of the atomic bomb”.
‘Australia’s most important novel’
Journalist Gideon Haigh calls On the Beach “arguably Australia’s most important novel — important in the sense of confronting a mass international audience with the defining issue of the age”.
British-born Shute emigrated in 1950 to Australia, where he lived outside Melbourne. As well as writing novels, he worked as an aeronautical engineer.
The title of On the Beach — which started life as a four-part story called The Last Days on Earth — ostensibly referred to a Royal Navy expression for reassignment. (Shute spent time in the Royal Naval Reserve during World War II.) However, as readers of Eliot’s poetry will know, the phrase also appears late in The Hollow Men:
In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.
As in Eliot’s poem, the characters that cluster together in the pages of Shute’s novel, set in and around Melbourne between 1962 and 1963, tend on occasion to avoid speech…………………………
The reason why the guests at Peter’s party are so keen to avoid serious talk is both simple and depressing. They are trying very hard to forget that they are all going to be dead from radiation poisoning in a matter of months.
Shute brings the reader up to speed after the dinner party wraps up. A massive nuclear war has devastated the entire northern hemisphere, wiping out all forms of life there. And the radioactive fallout generated during the conflict is now creeping — slowly but surely — into the southern hemisphere.
Shute makes it clear there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about this. In tonally dispassionate prose, he reveals that vast swathes of Australia have already been rendered uninhabitable due to radiation poisoning. The only thing the characters who remain can do is wait.
…………………………………………………………………………… This is the way Shute’s novel of nuclear extinction ends: not with a bang but with a whimper. Released at the height of the Cold War, On the Beach struck a chord with millions of concerned readers.
………………………………………………………………………Shute’s didactic inclinations are evident towards the end of the novel. “Peter,” the character Mary asks, “why did this all this happen to us?” Even at this late stage, Mary, whose radiation-racked body is spasming uncontrollably, wants to know whether things might have panned out differently. Her husband’s reply is revealing:
“I don’t know … Some kinds of silliness you just can’t stop,” he said. “I mean, if a couple of hundred million people all decide that their national honour requires them to drop cobalt bombs upon their neighbour, well, there’s not much that you or I can do about it. The only possible hope would have been to educate them out of their silliness.”
………………………..While the science in the novel was somewhat flawed, Shute’s cautionary tale undoubtedly spoke to the collective zeitgeist.
………………………………………………..
Shute’s vision of humanity’s self-inflicted destruction is eerily resonant in our time of climate emergency. The nuclear threat remains, too, in our perilous historical moment of democratic backsliding and failing nuclear states.
It seems increasingly likely the world as we know it is coming to an end — if it hasn’t already. The question remains: will it be with a bang or a whimper?
The mainstream media continues to beat the drums of war while voices of truth and reason are being silenced, writes Dr William Briggs.
JOHN PILGER, in highlighting the manipulation of our media, called on people to ‘speak up’.
The drive to war and the demonisation of China have seen many people speak up and speak out. That same manipulated media has muffled those voices and pushed dissent to the margins. Journals and websites like this one are increasingly becoming almost samizdat publications. The mainstream media has played an important role, not only in silencing dissident voices but in convincing the public that there is little effective opposition.
A glance at the anti-AUKUS website shows that over 1,000 individuals and more than 200 organisations have thus far lent their support for a rational and sane response to the rising threat of war with China and obscene military spending.
There are many important voices among the signatories but their voices are not regularly heard in our media. Their words do not appear in the major daily newspapers, regardless of how well-credentialed they might be. Our former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, has effectively been relegated to the sidelines for voicing a position that does not fit with the official line.
And, while the collective wisdom of so many is ignored, the war-mongers of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) are given free rein.
‘In so many ways, the product of ASPI is critically important, not only in informing the Australian public, but those of us in government who seek to play a role in this space.’
Marles states that the Australian public must be informed. He recognises this to be ‘critically important’ but there is an unhealthy degree of censorship that is impossible to ignore. The information that the public is allowed to see, hear and read is the information that is filtered. There is a strong sense of creeping authoritarianism in all of this………………………………………..
The intellectuals, essayists, poets and novelists that might speak up and speak out remain, either silent or silenced by the mainstream media. It is not that they are not there. It is not that many thousands of ordinary people do not share the view that things are terribly wrong. The media has played and is playing a bad role. It is media in name only. It has abandoned any semblance of independence. It is so hard to speak out if you are kept captive; if ideas are filtered and disinformation passes for truth.
Pilger rightly calls on those with a conscience to speak out. What needs to be remembered is that the marketplace for ideas has shrunk……………………..Truth has become the property of those who control the media.
Pilger has been sidelined. Film-maker David Bradbury, twice nominated for an Academy Award, is now touring his latest documentary, The Road to War, screening it wherever an audience can be found. Even so, its circulation and therefore its audience remains limited.
American vengefulness would see WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange die in prison. Successive Australian governments have behaved equally badly, but the USA calls the shots. Assange’s crime? To report the truth. The truth, however, is not what Richard Marles is thinking of when he talks of the ‘critical importance’ of informing the public.
…………………………John Pilger’s call, for us all to speak up, has never had more urgency. The decades since the end of WWII and the proclamation of the U.S.-inspired rules-based order have seen millions die in American-led wars.
Australians are particularly vulnerable to propaganda because Australia has the most concentrated media ownership in the western world, dominated by a powerful duopoly of Nine Entertainment (who airs 60 Minutes) and the Murdoch-owned News Corp. This vulnerability is being fully exploited as the time comes for the western empire to beat the war drums against China.
“It might sound like twisted logic, but military forces everywhere argue that the greater the firepower they possess, the greater the chance of maintaining peace,” opens 60 Minutes Australia’s Amelia Adams. “In other words, massive weaponry is the best deterrent to war. Right now the theory is being tested like never before, and much of it is happening in Australia’s backyard, the Indo-Pacific region. The United States wants the world, and more particularly China, to know of its increasing presence there, and to do that it’s putting on a spectacular show.”
What follows is 19 minutes of overproduced footage displaying this “massive weaponry” while Adams oohs and ahhs and gives slobberingly sycophantic interviews to US military officials.
“There’s something utterly mesmerising about the F-35 jet,” Adams moans. “The sound, the heat, and the power put this supersonic stealth fighter in a league of its own.”
“Colonel these are some very impressive machines you’re in charge of!” she gushes to an officer on an aircraft carrier.
“Yes ma’am,” the colonel replies.
Jesus lady, do your orgasming off camera.
Contrast this glowing ecstatic revelry with Adams’ open hostility later in the segment toward a Chinese think tanker named Henry Wang, claiming that he was trying to “rewrite history” for dismissing panic about a Chinese military buildup by pointing out (100 percent correctly) that China is spending a lower percentage of its GDP on its military than western nations.
“Every command, every maneuver, is being fine-tuned on this vast blue stage, where China has proven to be a bad actor, playing a long game of intimidating Pacific nations,” Adams proclaims over helicopter footage of US war ships. “But the US and its allies aren’t having it, bolstering their defenses — and it’s an impressive display.”
I defy you to find me footage more brazenly propagandistic than this, from any point in history. This is supposed to be a news show, run by people who purport to be journalists, yet they’re engaging in propaganda that looks like it came from a Sacha Baron Cohen spoof of a third world dictatorship.
As I never tire of pointing out, the claim that the US has been militarily encircling its number one geopolitical rival defensively is the single dumbest thing the empire asks us to believe these days. The US is surrounding China with war machinery in ways that it would consider an outrageously aggressive provocation if the same thing were done in its neck of the woods, which means the US is plainly the aggressor in this standoff, and China is plainly reacting defensively to those aggressions.
While the first segment unquestioningly regurgitates Pentagon narratives and gives supportive interviews to military officials, the second segment unquestioningly regurgitates talking points from the western intelligence cartel and gives supportive interviews to Five Eyes spooks.
“Showing off deadly weaponry in massive war games is a tactic China and the United States both use to try to avoid full-on combat,” says 60 Minutes Australia’s Nick McKenzie in introduction. “But the truth is the two countries, as well as other nations including Australia, are already battling it out in an invisible war. There are no frontline soldiers but there are significant skirmishes. Until now these conflicts have been kept quiet, but key members of a secretive alliance of top cops from Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand are about to change that.”
“Their group is called the Five Eyes, and tonight they want you to know what they see,” says McKenzie, which is the same as saying “We’re telling you what the Five Eyes intelligence agencies told us to tell you.”
McKenzie literally just assembles a bunch of Five Eyes officials to tell Australians that China is bad and dangerous, and then disguises the western intelligence cartel advancing its own information interests as a real news story.
“There is one threat that alarms our partners more than any other,” McKenzie says over dramatic music, asking “Which state actor is the key threat to democracy in Australia and amongst the Five Eyes partners?” and presenting a montage of western intelligence operatives answering (you guessed it) China.
“The Americans describe a growing menace on our doorstep flowing from China’s increasing influence in the region,” McKenzie says, before asking an American official, “Do you see the Chinese state preying on Pacific island nations?”
“I believe so, yes,” the official responds.
Western journalism, ladies and gents.
Australians are particularly vulnerable to propaganda because Australia has the most concentrated media ownership in the western world, dominated by a powerful duopoly of Nine Entertainment (who airs 60 Minutes) and the Murdoch-owned News Corp. This vulnerability is being fully exploited as the time comes for the western empire to beat the war drums against China.
We keep being hammered by this narrative that “massive weaponry is the best deterrent to war,” when all facts in evidence say the exact opposite is true. It was the military encroachment against Russia and the conversion of Ukraine into a NATO military asset which provoked Putin to invade Ukraine, and all the militarization against China that we are seeing is only inflaming tensions and making war more likely.
And, I mean, of course it is; even a casual glance at the Cuban Missile Crisis reveals that powerful nations don’t take kindly to having menacing forces placed near their borders. So much of the propaganda indoctrination we’re subjected to in the 2020s revolves around convincing people to believe that Russia and China should react completely differently than the way the US would react if foreign proxy forces were being amassed along its borders.
So yes, Amelia Adams, claiming that aggression and militarism is the best path toward peace is absolutely “twisted logic”. It is as twisted as it gets. Because it is false. This is obvious to anyone who hasn’t yet been successfully indoctrinated into this omnicidal belief system.
We need to do everything we can to fight against this indoctrination now, because if we wait until the war actually starts it will likely be too late to resist.
It gave US Secretary of State Antony Blinken an opportunity to do the usual cartwheel. “Far too many governments use repression to silence free expression, including through reprisals against journalists for simply doing their jobs,” goes his May 3 press statement. “We again call on Russian authorities to immediately release Wall Street reporter Gershkovich and all other journalists held for exercising freedom of expression.” What, then, of the Australian publisher and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange?
Selected days for commemoration serve one fundamental purpose. Centrally, they acknowledge the forgotten or neglected, while proposing to do nothing about it. It’s the priest’s confession, the chance for absolution before the next round of soiling.
These occasions are often money-making exercises for canny businesses: the days put aside to remember mothers and fathers, for instance. But there is no money to be made in saving writers, publishers, whistleblowers, and journalists from the avenging police state.
World Press Freedom Day, having limped on for three decades, is particularly fraught in this regard. It remains particularly loathsome, not least for giving politicians an opportunity to leave flimsy offerings at its shrine. These often come from the powerful, the very same figures responsible for demeaning and attacking those brave scribblers who do, every so often, show how the game is played.
Every year, we see reactions often uneven, and almost always hypocritical. The treatment of US journalist Evan Gershkovich is the stellar example for 2023. Here was the caged victim-hero scribbler, held in the remorseless clutches of the Russian Bear.
It gave US Secretary of State Antony Blinken an opportunity to do the usual cartwheel. “Far too many governments use repression to silence free expression, including through reprisals against journalists for simply doing their jobs,” goes his May 3 press statement. “We again call on Russian authorities to immediately release Wall Street reporter Gershkovich and all other journalists held for exercising freedom of expression.” What, then, of the Australian publisher and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange?
With unintended, bleak irony, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) also thought it fitting to rope in the Secretary at a World Press Freedom Day event organised in conjunction with the Washington Post. Talking to his interlocutor, the Post’s David Ignatius, Blinken spoke of efforts to “fight back and push back around the world to help journalists, who – in one way or another, are facing intimidation, coercion, persecution, prosecution, surveillance.” This seemed grimly comical, given that the United States, through its agencies, has engaged in intimidation, coercion, persecution, prosecution and surveillance against Assange, whose scalp they continue to seek with salivating expectation.
In the course of the event, Ignatius and Blinken encountered Code Pink activists Medea Benjamin and Tinghe Barry. Both were keen to test the Secretary’s lofty assessments about Washington’s stance on free expression and journalistic practice. “Excuse me, we can’t use this day without calling for the freedom of Julian Assange,” exclaimed Benjamin, storming the stage where the two men were engaged in bland conversation. A bemused Ignatius duly approved of Benjamin’s eviction by three burly minders, seeing it all as part of “free expression”.
Barry’s own assessment of the whole show summed matters up. “Two hours and not one word about journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh, who was murdered by Israeli occupation forces in Palestine, not one word about Julian Assange.”
Others from the US State Department were also found wanting. A department press briefing from Vedant Patel, principal deputy spokesperson, opened with comments about World Press Freedom Day. He echoed the belief in “the importance of a free press. It’s a – we believe a bedrock of democracy.”
Then came a question from Matt Lee of Associated Press: Did the State Department regard Assange “as a journalist who is – who should be covered by the ideas embodied in World Press Freedom Day?”
Patel’s response did not deviate from the views of his superiors. “The State Department thinks that Mr Assange has been charged with serious criminal conduct in the United States, in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in our nation’s history.”
With dutiful adherence to a narrative worn and extensively disproved in Assange’s extradition trial proceedings, Patel spoke of actions that “risked serious harm to US national security to the benefit of our adversaries” (there was none) and subjected “human sources to grave and imminent risk of serious physical harm and arbitrary detention” (no evidence has ever been adduced by the Department of Justice on this point)…………………………………………………………….. more https://theaimn.com/hypocritical-commemorations-world-press-freedom-day/
Apr 15, 2026 01:00 AM in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney
Join the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) on Tuesday, April 14th for a timely webinar exploring the risks associated with nuclear power and challenging the myth that it offers a simple, safe, carbon-free solution to the climate crisis
21 April Webinar: No Nuclear Weapons in Australia
Start: 2026-04-21 18:00:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
End: 2026-04-21 19:30:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
Event Type: Virtual A virtual link will be communicated before the event.
Antinuclear 